The essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) which opens Clement Greenberg’s volume Art and Culture (1961) remains one of the most influential discussions of modernism and its relationship with popular culture. Greenberg’s championing of avant-garde movements in their radical break with the past, their disdainful and irreverent attitude towards tradition, and their desire to create a true new beginning, was, as one might expect at the time, especially focused on French models. Italian modernism emerges however in this essay as an intriguing case study, given its flourish under Fascism. Whilst in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia the respective state-sponsored art programmes made ample ideological use of kitsch, Italy was, at least for a time before the introduction of Mussolini’s new Imperial style, a special case in the development of European modernism. Here was a country in which modernism could coincide with a totalitarian regime. Italian modernists did not emerge unscathed from this association. Indeed, the legacy of the controversial relationship between Fascism and Italian modernism has had a longstanding impact on the chronology and evaluation of the modernist movement in Italy, partly erasing Italy from the map of international modernism.
During Phase 1 of the project, we held our first workshop in New York (Casa Italiana/NYU, New York, 22 February 2013) focusing on Italian Interdisciplinary Modernism. Here was an attempt on our part to grapple with disciplinary constructions of meaning and to reflect on what constitutes modernism in Italy. A number of questions emerged: why is modernism a less established category in the context of the study of Italian cultural production? Does modernism mean different things if one looks at it from differing artistic and disciplinary perspectives? How useful is it to focus on continuity and/or discontinuity when looking at this multifaceted movement? Finally, and more crucially for our project, what happens if we focus on those cultural products and practitioners who crossed multiple mediatic and artistic barriers?
If we look at the interplay between the built-environment, fashion, design and the visual arts, the dazzling complexity of influences and porosity of boundaries becomes apparent. Domus magazine (1928-), since the late 1920s and 1930s, under the editorship of Gio Ponti, was responsible for the diffusion in Italy of the lexicon of international modernist design and architecture. Photography, in the pages of specialist and more popular magazines, played a major role in visualising modernist buildings, interiors, and art works. Art journals in interwar Italy embraced avant-garde art and were thoroughly up-to-date on the contemporary art scene in Western Europe. Countless Italian artists, since the fin-de-siècle, spent considerable periods of time in Paris, the unrivalled centre of the international avant-garde, and were thus able to act as cultural mediators of international modernism back in Italy. Elsa Schiapparelli, arguably the most important modernist fashion designer, belongs to this group of international modernists who crossed artistic and medial boundaries as seamlessly as they did national barriers. Emilio Pucci, whose garments in the post-war period were the antithesis of the still heavily corseted elegance of post-war Parisian couture, grew up close to Florentine Futurism and was heavily influenced by Futurist art and fashion (Emily Braun, “Making Waves”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 20:1, 2015).
Yet, too often we tend not to focus on this complexity of artistic exchange; we remain reluctant to crossing disciplinary boundaries. If modernism can still teach us something it is that boundaries are there to be crossed, fearlessly if possible.
